>> We all know that climate change is one of
the biggest issues we need to tackle.
Fortunately, tech industry has
a lot to offer to solve some of these challenges.
In this episode of CodeStories,
we are going to have multiple guests.
Let's get started.
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I'm currently at Microsoft Office in Denmark.
Ideally, I would have had everyone here with me,
but because of this current situation,
I need to meet them all via Team's call.
Let's start by having a conversations with Hampus Jakobsson.
>> My name is Hampus Jakobsson.
I am a General Partner and one of the founders of Pale Blue Dot
Pale Blue Dot is a climate tech venture fund.
What we mean by that is we only invest in
companies driving climate change the right direction.
At the same time as we're a completely normal fund,
we invest in companies that are going
to be billion dollar companies,
we invest in companies that can grow quickly.
All of that normal stuff that venture funds do,
but we only do it within things that are climate.
The reason we wanted this is we want to be able to deploy
the most amount of money into moving
climate change to the right direction.
>> To dive a little bit into the climate change issues,
with your knowledge of business and climate change,
how does this impact the way of doing business?
>> As a big company, I think that you have optimized
your current ways and you've set
something and you're working with operation extents.
That's why you run the world and
you're the biggest company of that era.
The problem is like when change comes along,
it either is new behaviors that you have to work with,
like new consumer behavior or new customer demands,
or these new opportunities that shouldn't use new technology.
Climate changes both sides.
When you're a big company, it's very hard to
address this with your business as usual models.
Essentially we see that there are
only three ways of handling that if you're a big company.
Either you start collaborating directly with startups,
and you try to find the best in-breed that are
helping with that issue and collaborate with our customers.
Or you start a startup,
like people from the company says, "Hey,
I want to go and leave and do this thing in better right way."
Or the thirdly, you actually create some way
for employees to get out of
their bubble and start thinking new ways,
and that might be hackathons or other ways.
>> If you are a young person aware
of these changes ahead, what would you do?
>> I think the first thing I would do is I would
really try to get perfection out of the picture.
Because I think there's a very big risk where you
think that you need to become something that you're not,
like you need to rescue yourself and become
a nuclear scientist or an energy optimization person or something.
I think that is just as it's been in every single era.
You need to do what you're really, really good at.
I think the biggest difference is you should
come in with the mindset of saying,
how is this viable and possible year 2040?
If this is a thing that you think might be
a thing that's going to disappear, you will not do it.
If you just think about forest fires are going increase,
we're going to need to create more energy,
we need to create more food,
we need to able to use less land.
If you start thinking about these problems,
a lot of these problems are problems
that software people can handle them.
But you shouldn't go in and be afraid that you're going to
do one percent bad and 99 percent good and not do it.
That is the most common issue for
people who come into the climate scene.
They're very, very afraid of not being perfect.
>> Thanks Hampus. This is really good advice.
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>> As Hampus mentioned,
hackathons are a really good way to give chance to employees and
students to get out of
their bubbles and create innovative solutions.
In the March 2021,
we organized climate hackathon.
The goal of this hackathon was to
raise awareness about climate change,
and at the same time,
create a platform for developer community to
create innovative solutions to solve some of these challenges.
What's made this hackathon unique
was the collaboration with non-profit and
non-governmental organizations that have
an important role to play,
but at the same time,
they might not have enough tech competencies
or resources to solve these challenges.
They provided real-life challenge for the participant to solve,
and these challenges were defined in four categories.
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>> I'm going to talk to Matteo Jucker Riva,
was one of the participants of this climate hackathon.
He's going to tell us about
the project that he and his team worked on.
Hi, Matteo. Thank you for joining us.
>> Hi, Sherry. Thanks for inviting me.
>> Can you tell me a little bit about
the solution that you and your team came up with?
>> During the hackathon climate,
I was immediate excited to
see the request from the Cool Farm Alliance.
They wanted something that could help farmers estimate
their carbon emissions and
value what they are doing in terms of mitigating climate change.
Ever since I first saw satellite images,
I always thought that there is
a lot that we can do with satellite images
and AI to help farmers and help better manage our environment.
So we built an app that allows to estimate
how much carbon that is
stored in the soil and in the vegetation of farms,
and we called that LandPro.
>> That sounds super interesting.
But can you explain how does it work?
>> Of course. When a user access LandPro,
he or she can select the area of interest.
For example, this is the farm of my father in Italy.
Then we get the satellite images
that are most relevant for that area,
and we use a deep learning model to
differentiate different types of land cover.
After that, we use shortwave infrared
to calculate how much carbon that is stored in the soil,
and near infrared to
calculate how much carbon is stored in the vegetation.
This information is then returned to the user
in a simple way for the web interface.
>> Can you tell me a bit about what
your architecture look like for LandPro.
>> The front-end is based on React and Azure Maps,
there the user can select the area,
then the area information is encoded in
a GeoJSON and sent to the back-end.
The back-end uses Cloud service to select
the best Sentinel 2 images for that area.
Sentinel 2 is the new satellite for Earth observation that is
available since a few years and is higher resolution,
higher temporal resolution,
so you're setting the new standard,
that is the new thing in Earth observation.
This image pass through
unit semantic segmentation model based on TensorFlow.
Then we use several libraries to calculate
our metrics and deal with the image processing.
There is NumPy for the calculations,
there is OpenCV for the image processing,
but then there are also specialized libraries
for geographic data,
like GDAL and Rasterio.
Once the calculations are complete,
the information is encoded again into a GeoJSON and
transferred to the front-end where
the user can access it in a visual form.
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>> Can you tell me about your biggest challenge
you encounter in developing your application?
>> Actually, the most crucial part of
this program is being able to distinguish
different types of land cover so
that our metrics could be accurate enough.
For that, we had to train a well-known model,
the unit semantic segmentation
model for our particular type of images.
Fortunately, there are lots of
datasets that are available for this task.
One of them is called the land cover net,
and it allowed us to train the model.
This took us 1.5 days after the five days of the hackathon.
But after that, we could easily distinguish different types of
land cover and produce more accurate matrix for the user.
>> I know you having the stuff working since the hackathon.
Can you tell me about what happened
after and what your future plan look like?
>> Yes, it was a very big surprise for
us to be awarded second place at the hackathon.
After that, we received a lot of
good feedback about our idea and our program.
We decided to continue.
LandPro is now a startup in a pre-accelerator program and
we're looking forward to improving also the technical side.
In particular, we look forward to use
a Planetary Computer by Microsoft.
It's a Cloud-based hub where we can access
an enormous amount of different types of satellites
and we can combine this with weather data,
climatic data, and all other types
of information that would help us improve our services.
>> Thank you very much, Matteo,
and good luck in your journey.
LandPro is a great example of how events like
Climate Hackathon can spark and facilitate innovations.
But as I mentioned to you earlier,
we had many more great solutions out of this hackathon.
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>> Another person I know who works
daily with green technology is Asim Hussain.
>> Hi. My name's Asim Hussain.
I'm what's called the Green Cloud Advocacy Lead at Microsoft.
My job is about figuring out
how can you actually build green applications?
What is a green application?
As a bunch of things that we've done already,
one of the things I'd recommend people going
out to visit a site called principles.green,
which is a list of core principles which you can use if
you're a software engineer to build greener applications.
>> How do we think developers can become
better on building greener software applications?
>> It's a great question and it's such a new field
of computing that
is forming right now we're calling
it, Green Software Engineering.
Recently, I'm really excited to announce that we've actually
formed a Green Software Foundation and one
of the goals of the foundation is to help
grow the field of Green Software Engineering.
Is a non-profit that's managed by
the Linux Foundation and we've got
several founding members including Microsoft,
Accenture, ThoughtWorks, GitHub,
as well as Goldman Sachs,
and a non-profits WattTime,
Leaders For Climate Action in
the Green Web Foundation and if you head to the website
greensoftware.foundation you'll find more information
about us and what we're doing
and you can sign in to our newsletter to stay
up-to-date on the latest news on Green Software Engineering.
>> With your insights,
what are the areas we need to prioritize to
reach our goals for solving these climate challenges?
>> We know what we need to do to solve for
the 2030 goals that we've got in front of
us and technology and software is
a large part to play in helping us meet those goals.
But technology by itself has always
been about making work more efficient.
But we need to do moving forward is to start thinking
about making your applications carbon efficient.
That means for the same amount of work,
we are emitting less carbon.
That's really the goal of technologists
and technology moving forward.
>> Thank you, Asim, for these valuable insights.
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>> Let's get back to Hampus to find out how can we
develop solutions that meet these criteria?
Let me rewind a little bit.
I read an article you wrote about climate first,
can you explain what you mean?
>> You remember back in 2008,
you had these tiny little mobile phones
and there were certain things you just couldn't do with them.
Like you couldn't book a trip,
you couldn't plan anything because the screen was just tiny.
It was impossible to do and as soon as you need to do those tasks,
you went to desktop, you want a bigger ass screen,
and are able to do whatever you want there.
Then suddenly they came these players who essentially took
this and they build mobile apps or mobile webpages.
But they made them better. They made them better.
Better, of course, than this because it was tiny,
but they also made them better than desktop.
We know that today because like when you order
food or book a trip or whatever you're going to do with mobile,
not because you have it in your pocket, but because it's better.
What was thing about those companies when they came out?
They were mobile first.
They use the fact that you had to think about the core use case.
They had to leverage what the mobile phone can do
and make it better than a desktop was because otherwise,
they couldn't be in conference.
What we see is we see climate
first start-ups and a climate for a startup is somebody who says,
let's look at limitations we have.
We want to use as little material as we can,
or we want to have last mile
that isn't fossil-free or whatever it is,
something that the encumbrance thinks it's impossible to
squeeze in and they just want to go to
the desktop and do something different there.
But instead of making this a problem,
you make it an opportunity,
climate first startups are somebody that looks at
the climate challenge and they leverage it.
They don't see it as less, they see it as better.
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>> I really hope this episode
inspired you to realize as a developer,
you have a very important role to play to reduce carbon emissions.
If you want to learn more about sustainable Software Engineering,
please check the link below and remember,
as Hampus mentioned, nobody is
perfect and neither are the solutions.
But if we all work together,
we can create solutions that solve
these big issue that impacts every single one of us.
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